Online research in philosophy

Computationalism – the view that cognition is computation – has been controversial from the start. It faces insufficiency objections and objections from neural realization. According to insufficiency objections, computation is insufficient for some cognitive phenomenon X. According to objections from neural realization, biological computations are realized by neural processes, but neural processes have feature Y and having Y is incompatible with being (or realizing) a computation. In this paper, I explain why computationalism has survived these objections. Insufficiency objections are at (...) best partial: for all they establish, computation may be sufficient for cognitive phenomena other than X, may be part of the explanation for X, or both. Objections from neural realization are based either on a false contrast between feature Y and computation or on an account of computation that is too vague to yield the desired conclusion. To adjudicate the dispute between computationalism and its foes, I will conclude that we need a more precise account of computation. (shrink)

Computationalism – the view that cognition is computation – has been controversial from the start. It faces insufficiency objections and objections from neural realization. According to insufficiency objections, computation is insufficient for some cognitive phenomenon X. According to objections from neural realization, biological computations are realized by neural processes, but neural processes have feature Y and having Y is incompatible with being (or realizing) a computation. In this paper, I explain why computationalism has survived these objections. Insufficiency objections are at (...) best partial: for all they establish, computation may be sufficient for cognitive phenomena other than X, may be part of the explanation for X, or both. Objections from neural realization are based either on a false contrast between feature Y and computation or on an account of computation that is too vague to yield the desired conclusion. To adjudicate the dispute between computationalism and its foes, I will conclude that we need a more precise account of computation. (shrink)

Biological neural computation relies a great deal on architecture, which constrains the types of content that can be processed by distinct modules in the brain. Though artificial neural networks are useful tools and give insight, they cannot be relied upon yet to give definitive answers to problems in cognition. Knowledge re-use may be driven more by architectural inheritance than by epistemological drives.

I argue that neural activity, strictly speaking, is not computation. This is because computation, strictly speaking, is the processing of strings of symbols, and neuroscience shows that there are no neural strings of symbols. This has two consequences. On the one hand, the following widely held consequences of computationalism must either be abandoned or supported on grounds independent of computationalism: (i) that in principle we can capture what is functionally relevant to neural processes in terms of some formalism taken from (...) computability theory (such as Turing Machines), (ii) that it is possible to design computer programs that are functionally equivalent to neural processes in the same sense in which it is possible to design computer programs that are functionally equivalent to each other, (iii) that the study of neural (or mental) computation is independent of the study of neural implementation, (iv) that the Church-Turing thesis applies to neural activity in the sense in which it applies to digital computers. On the other hand, we need to gradually reinterpret or replace computational theories in psychology in terms of theoretical constructs that can be realized by known neural processes, such as the spike trains of neuronal ensembles. (shrink)